I’ve been using Twitter since 2010 and mainly use it to find interesting ideas about teaching English to adult speakers of other languages (TESOL). As I got a bit braver, I started retweeting things that interested me, and I even tweeted a few links to some resources I made on my old website, slurpenglish.com.

My very limited PLN on day one.

That is as about as far as my online professional learning network (PLN) has gone so far. In the offline world, I have great colleagues that I discuss TESOL teaching with on a day-to-day basis. We share resources we have created or discovered.

The task for Assignment 2 of my Connected Learning course is to develop my contribution within a PLN. I am going to choose speaking activities in the TESOL classroom because I am always looking for ways to improve my teaching of communication and the activities that I give my students. I need to expand the reach of my currently limited PLN. Here is my plan:

• Save some hashtags relating to TESOL communication on Twitter, read it daily and retweet the interesting ones
• Start using hashtags in my tweets (can’t believe I haven’t done this much so far!)
• Start communicating with other users on Twitter, asking questions, commenting and so on
• Join online groups, perhaps Reddit
• Follow more bloggers who are interested in TESOL communication
• Find TESOL communication activities online and review on my blog

Here are some additional things I could do on this blog:

• Create more content for other teachers to use.
• Record some videos or music
• Create infographics to illustrate my thoughts and findings

Shortly, I’ll get around to mapping my PLN to the framework provided by Ito et al.

Phew! That’s a lot. I wonder how much I will do?

References:

Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., Schor, J., Sefton-   Green, J., & Craig Watkins, S. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. Retrieved from https://dmlhub.net/publications/connected-learning-agenda-for-research-and-design/